Rick from HVACR Survival and the HVAC GUY talk about work

Attention, please. The show starts in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. All right, we are live, guys, and we are here with Rick Durmeier of HVACR Survival. Yay! What's up, everybody? Hey, what's up? I need to get it pulled up so I can see comments. There's Mike B. Mikey B. Hey, one of the reasons I wanted to ask you to come on was because you've been doing some residential work lately. How do you like it? Oh, yeah. Remember, I've done residential about 19 years before I got into where I'm doing what I'm doing now. So it's not new. It's just I don't usually do it anymore. So and I hate install. So it's kind of like doing it to help him out a little bit, which is the job's done. And but it turned out pretty good. And it's doing great. He's already saving money on his electric bill. So yeah, let me ask you, did you ever insulate the ductwork underneath? No. Um, I don't usually do that. Uh, normally I want leakage. I want heat, um, to, you know, help keep the floors a little bit warm, stuff like that. The only reason why I ran flex was so it'd be easier to stretch it across the floor. Not so much for the insulation value. Um, you know, I went ahead and yeah, I haven't gotten to it yet, but I actually went through and used the pooky stuff. Some people asked about that. I did that just because, um, you know, as long as he keeps the humidity down with that dehumidifier, it wasn't sweating the ducts. But if it does, then obviously we're going to probably have to do it, which I can get some duct wrap and wrap around it, staple it on. Well, I was more worried about cold weather up there in Ohio affecting the temperature of the air when you're trying to run the heat. I had the same system in my first house. I ran a. This, you know, uninsulated duct, and usually it stays pretty warm down there. You know, you're technically three foot underground or so, at least whatever. The outside walls are insulated on those blocks. So I don't know how cold his gets usually in the winter. We'll find out. But. I guess we'll see what my temperature rise is on it when we get going, but I did oversize it. I haven't showed it yet, but it is a two-stage. I didn't know it was a two-stage, so people would be like, this guy didn't even have a clue what he sold him, and it's like, no. Hey, there's Ewok. What's up, man? So, um... But yeah, it's one of those things where it was a pleasant surprise because it technically barely needed two tons of cooling, and I went with two and a half. just because I wanted the extra heat output and so now it's going to automatically stage that if it needs to. Good good good. I've been recently I've been trying to focus more on spending more time on my jobs and not be in such a hurry. I think everybody at some time has had a job or been in a position where they have to do like six to eight calls a day. There's a lot of pressure I just happen to now be in a position where I can. Spend the time on the job, so that's what I'm doing. I'm spending more time on the job, being more thorough, and just trying to do a good job. And honestly, fighting the urge when there's pressure for you to get another call, to get another call, or you know your phone's ringing, you know your schedule's already full, and you see another call come through, just fight the urge to try to do more and more and more. Um, that's what I'm having to deal with right now. Um, I'm more, are you hourly or flat rate or how's your pricing? Uh, I normally just charge labor and materials. That's kind of how we do it too. Unless it's a quoted job. And the way I look at it, you actually make more money staying still unless you're making money on your trip charge. So why pay for the mileage, the gas, and all the other crap? You can stay and continue. I mean, unless you've got people waiting on you, then that's just a matter of keeping the service going so that people aren't potentially going somewhere else. I do not get in a hurry on any of my jobs. I get asked all the time, how long did that take you? And sometimes I'm like, I don't really tell you because I don't get in a hurry. I never fails. I always find something wrong by just taking my time and looking it over and not getting in a hurry on things. And it never fails. You'll find something that was loose. You'll find something that, you know, you may have easily, you obviously missed because all of a sudden, boom, I caught that before I left. Awesome, that worked out great. So I don't get in a hurry. We've got guys that do, you know, I kind of know that they think I'm slow, but it's not because I can't do it faster. It's just because I choose not to because I don't want to. The way we were paid before was commission-based, meaning we'll give you 60% of whatever we charge, but we'll hold you accountable if you have problems and we have to send Bobby over to finish it up. We're taking Bobby's time away from your time. So we paid you more than what we normally would an hourly guy, so we're going to make you warranty it if you screwed up on something you should have caught. Now, that didn't happen very often, but that was always kind of my mentality anyway. I don't want to call back, and usually I've had maybe two, three, four a year at the most. where I actually lost some money, but for the most part, it worked out really good doing it the way we did it. And the nice thing was the company didn't lose anything. It isn't that dirty type of commission that you hear about these guys selling stuff. So I kind of experienced some of that. Yeah, that's that's when I say commission, I know that's like, oh, you scam artists. No, that's not the way we worked. The company we that I work for, even though we currently have about one hundred and fifteen employees. We're probably one of the largest in this area. We are an honest company. We started out in a rural area, and then we combined with a couple others. All the original owners are still there because everybody works together so well. The reputation of these companies has been really good. And so... We aren't the cheapest, but we back up what we do. If we make a mistake or we have to fix something, we stand behind it. And that's the kind of reputation that the company's had. And I wish I could go into and show where I work at, but they kind of want me to keep that stuff. more quiet. Um, cause they're afraid that, you know, it might, I don't know. They have this funny feeling that they, they don't want to show things because they're afraid we might lose a customer. And my feeling is, I think everybody should wear a camera. I think everybody should document their work. Everybody should both put their phone number and name on their job before they leave. And if you can't, then you didn't do the job, right. You didn't do, you know, you didn't take pride in your work, but not everybody thinks like that. And then some people are like, Oh, you're showing everybody how to do all this stuff. And it's like, we can't find no We know good people anyway, no matter what we pay. Nobody's going to see this and all of a sudden take our job away. Give me a break. That's such a poor mentality. That's the crap they did when I first started. Nobody wanted to tell you nothing because they thought they were gonna take your job. And it's like, no, that's not happening. People say the same thing to me. Aren't you worried about showing people how to do it? I'm like, I don't have any competition. You know, um, I'm not worried about the competition because I see it. I go behind it every day. There's too many... Hacks, I don't want to call them hacks, but maybe young guys who don't really understand how to do a good job or something. And so, no, I'm not worried about it. Not at all. Yeah, it's, you know, and like I said, you're always going to have people that just call whoever they've seen in the book. But most of the people we have are customers that have been with us for 10, 20 years or longer buying their second and third furnace from us type thing. And so, you know, generally, unless we do something dumb, we're not going to lose that customer, especially a lot of our commercial and industrial customers. I mean, we try to keep really good with them. We do a lot of nursing homes. Those are customers we've had for a long, long time. And, I mean, when something's not right, the boss man's right up there taking care of the situation, making sure we don't lose that kind of work because it's reliable work that's, you know, there. Didn't you just tell me y'all dropped on? Grocery stores. Yeah. We dropped some of the local grocery stores. They were a private chain, technically. It was about five or six of them. And I know I was really posting a lot of videos on that recently. And, you know, even the owner or the guy that kind of made the purchasing decisions for the for the chain found out, which I don't really beat around about it. But he. He watched it, and he actually kind of enjoyed it, and like I said, I'm like, he gets to see why it takes so long, because sometimes they would complain about their bill, and it's like, well, I have to drive an hour or an hour and 15 minutes to get there, an hour and 15 minutes back, because we charge both directions, and then it might took me two or three hours to unfold a coil, or maybe it took four hours. It's just who knows how long, and he was getting to be able to see that, and you've got to be careful what you're saying, because you say this equipment's garbage or something. That's obviously something they don't want to hear. Uh, so we use code words like this equipment's tired, stuff like that. You know, it's just one of those things, believe it or not, man. Sometimes people get all uptight about the dumbest things, but I'm always, yeah. I found the, like the refrigeration racks that you were working. I don't ever work on anything like that. I found that interesting. I love it. I think it's fun. Uh, on my last show we had, um. Brett Wetzel, and he was talking about working on CO2. Do you work on any of that? No, nobody in my area has got the money to invest in that right now. Generally, I think those kind of systems, you're pretty much going to have to gut everything. They run at such high pressure. That the current copper and all that stuff is going to have to be completely taken out. The cases are going to have to be replaced. The condensers are going to have to be replaced. It's all got to be brand new. And so unless it's a brand new store, which, you know, we do some Gordon Foods, which I don't, I don't know how big they are, but they're pretty good size. I don't, do you have any Gordons down where you're at? No. Okay. There, I think there might be based out of Michigan or something. Thank you for listening. And, you know, it's just like the Menards and things like that. They're out of Wisconsin. So it's kind of like a Northern Territory thing. But they're a lot like Sam's or whatever. I do some of their work and stuff like that. They've got everything kind of clamped down to where you can't do too many adjustments and stuff. All those control panels, like the Emerson's that I work on, anything you change as far as temperatures, set points, alarms, any of that is all data logged. So if somebody changes something and causes something not to alarm and they lose money because they lose food or product, as they call it, it can be traced back to you that you're the one that caused that problem. So I really like the networking stuff in which, you know, our company does networking far as. You know, controls guys and stuff. And I have the opportunity to jump over to that if I wanted to. Thank you. But, you know, it's not something I've once I kind of seen what was really involved in it. I'm not as interested to want to do it now. But, you know, I have so many options if I wanted to do other things, I could. The commission thing kind of raised along with me because today I went on a call. The customer was given an estimate for two thousand dollars to replace a Broad Ocean X-13 motor. And it was under warranty. That's the deal. I mean, even if it, in the Broad Ocean, OEM motor costs $612, but they were wanting to charge her $1,529 for that motor. Completely double it. Yeah, we don't do that crazy stuff. Ours can range anywhere from 20% to maybe 30%. It just depends. I know some things like filters, stuff like that, we don't mark those up much at all just because people know what the price is on it. We get good prices on some stuff. That's why we go through certain vendors over and over. You get better price tiers and stuff like that. But, yeah, we don't do stuff like that. But, you know, to me, that was, we got like two really big companies in town and maybe three big companies in town and maybe two or three others that have like 20 employees. And this was one of the big companies in town that keeps techs for a long time. And in my opinion, I thought they were a more reputable company. But given somebody prices like that, I can understand maybe not seeing that it was under warranty. Or if it was an Infinity motor for a carrier. I mean, our costs on some of those motors are $1,000. No, this was like... Like an X-13 style motor? An X-13 and a bad one. One of the worst ones. Oh, okay. I never heard of it. Well, that Ocean thing, I think they're making everybody's crap now. It's a Chinese brand or manufacturer. It is Chinese. It's called Broad Ocean. And those motors fail more frequently than other X-13 motors. If I had seen a Broad Ocean motor in there, I would have quoted them an aftermarket replacement motor because it's more dependable. Sure. So it's just got regular taps one through five and you pick what it is it's doing to run at that speed? Yeah. And it just has plugs. So really all you do is unplug one and plug in the other. Gotcha. Sounds simple. I just, I couldn't believe that they were trying to charge that much money for a blower motor. And I do understand, like, communicating motors, there are some that really are that expensive, but this was not one of them, not at all. Gotcha. Yeah, that's, yeah, I don't know. There was a couple of companies that went to that type of flat rate pricing. Like, the company I worked at before, I actually implemented that because we were having so many problems with people not. paying the bill so we wanted to collect and to make collecting easy we went to flat rate it was called flat rate plus and it was outrageously i mean you could change it to whatever you wanted you could change it to whatever multiplier you want you could customize everything and i went through and customized it to the linux stuff that we sold at the time and we pretty much made it to the same price as we normally would and you know it made it work i don't know if they still use it after i left but it was one of the things where it can be good or It can be good or it can be bad. It just depends. Now it's set up. I'm trying to get back to our comments here. Yeah, there's quite a few of them there. Yeah, the Broad Ocean motors are just absolutely horrible. And that's what Bosch is putting in their systems? Bosch, yeah. I did a Bosch system for my in-laws, one of their inverter systems. It was the first generation, and I had so many problems with the dehumidification, which don't make sense because there was people in Florida that have real humidity issues, and they were able to overcome it. And luckily, I got a hold of Bergman, and he looked at all my specs, what I had, and we figured out a way to make my variable speed furnace a stage really low. And so we used Y1, Y2, and Y3, and we ended up using dehumidification mode in the furnace. I think it started off first, I think, in DHOM, and if it couldn't satisfy, it would sit there and step to Y2, which then brought it up to normal speed. And then because it was non-communicating, and I debated on getting a Bosch for my boy on that because, I mean, they were like $2,200 back in the day for a three-ton unit. And, you know, it's like, well, for that kind of efficiency you can get, but I don't like the fact it's not communicating. You don't like that. I kind of prefer having a system that is not communicating and have legacy 24-volt wiring because when it's communicating, for example, if your condenser's not running, you go out there on a communicating system, all you can tell is that, hey, I'm getting a variable DC signal out here. You don't know what it's telling it. You don't even know if it's calling for the compressor to come on or not. Depends on what brand it is. What brand are we talking, though? Oh, basically all the communicating brands from train to carrier. See on carrier, we can go to the stat, hold the fan button for 10, 15 seconds. I can see the exact RPMs of everything should be turning. And generally they'll, they'll, they'll know back immediately if something's not working. I mean, carrier, I think was the first one with the communication stuff. I mean, they've got it perfected. It's just so dang expensive. I mean, like if you're going out to the condenser and you're trying to tell if you're getting a call for the thing to run, you can't. There's no way. But if you've got 24-volt legacy wiring, you can at least tell if it's trying to bring on the compressor or not. Yeah, I mean, the carrier's got both capable. They can do communication and regular Y, you know, 2, 1, whatever common. But usually if we sell them an Infinity system, we usually sell them the Infinity thermostat. And the Infinity thermostat will tell you what's going on. And then you can go through the history, which is what I liked about it, is it'll data log everything. Every time it acted up, then you can usually see exactly what was the outdoor temperature, what was going on when it did it, you know. What was the house temperature? All this sort of like a timestamp of what was going on. And I always thought that was pretty nice. But when Linux got into it, they did a horrible job with the communication stuff. I know Reem and stuff's got it now, but I haven't seen it lately. So I'm like, I'm way behind on a lot of the residential stuff now because I don't hardly get to see it anymore. Oh. There's so much new stuff coming out. You can be up to date and a month later be behind. So don't feel like you need to. know, keep up to date with everything because it's impossible. I quit working for a train dealership and now I've become behind on their communicating stuff. I think it's just be getting on a job where you find one of those, know what you're looking at and be able to find maybe a manual or something if you need it. Sure. That's the thing I always hated was not being able to get the manuals or it's all in PDF file. And sometimes it's good or bad, depending if you If you've got your iPad with a bigger screen, but yeah. Yeah, and sometimes companies like Trane will restrict their manuals for like a year or so. Trane's been a pain. We sell some of their stuff when it's required, when people ask for it. We've got a few different restaurants that want it, so we'll get it, and we can buy it. But when you need help with it, you're on your own. I Or I call my buddy Steve down there and be like, Steve, hey, what about this? don't Uh, yeah, I didn't get around to that one. It's like, dude, you're killing me here. So, yeah. What is Steve doing now? Isn't he? He's doing stuff in the office type stuff. know. He's like working with this brand of, some sort of brand of Trane. And they build these units at his place where he works at. And he's doing, it sounds really fun what he's doing. It's kind of like networking, but not networking. No, it's, I don't know. We'll have to bring him on one day and ask him. But, yeah, he likes what he's doing. That's the neat thing. It's not an RR. Is that an old post or a current one that he's did? I think he's responding to somebody. Okay, yeah, because I'm like, let me scroll down here. Yeah, he's still on here. I seen him 26 seconds ago, 10 seconds ago, so he's on here. DOAS, that's what it is. I managed a field support team. There we go. So, yeah. Now I've, I've been able to call him on some things and it's like, dude, what, what, what's going on with this? You know? And, and he can get me some of the info and stuff, which is kind of nice. So, and then, you know, by doing this, I've got a few contacts with people that work for one of the previous train, uh, dealers and stuff. So I've, that's one neat thing about doing the YouTube thing is I've gotten a lot of cool information from people and, you know, I know where to look if I need it. So, or I've got people I can kind of rely on if I need it. So that's one thing. Nice. I haven't really I haven't really called anybody you know there have been a couple times when I needed some tech support and there was one time I told the customer I need to do a little bit of research went out and I had to find the manual and read almost the whole thing. And come back and try to diagnose, but I'd rather tell them, Hey, I need to get a little help on this one and at least come back and be competent at what I'm doing. Sure. I'm not afraid to call them. I mean, I'd be like, I tell people, you know especially like say with the generators and stuff, I'd be like, we only learned how to use the book. We didn't learn how every individual thing works. And sometimes, you know, or for me, if it's a different brand, it's not our normal brand. I'm not going to spend forever trying to feel, figure it out. I'd rather call them, hey, here's what's going on. This is what I think. Am I on the right track or not? Boom. Hopefully, boom, get on down the road. I ain't afraid. It just all, I think, feels like depends on how you explain why and what you're doing. I want to get you the right answer and save you some time and money at the same time. So usually nobody ever seems to make too big a deal about it. I've been on some Aon stuff where I've had to do that. Yep, I've done that. Aon is quite different. And then there was this one hotel I used to take care of, and they had an air conditioner dehumidifier system for the pool room. Like a Dektron unit. And that thing was really complicated, and I called tech support on that. Yeah, we got one of those. I do at the YMCA. I've got two YMCAs I do. I've got a Dektron unit that was from 1998. Right now, we're running with no major controls. We have a, we had a Siemens controller in there that lost its memory, and we're now running it with a three-stage regular thermostat and a variable heat thermostat. Basically controls a, a Belimo. Actuator so that it can maintain a certain temperature and so you've run the air conditioning and the heat at the same time to control Humidity, but yeah those and that and they pretty much all are made in Canada Which makes it sometimes a language barrier depending on where it's at because the French Quarter Sometimes is where that place is at you really run into some issues with Dialect and stuff where it's like you just can't quite make them out real well when you're talking to them But I got a video where I converted that thing over and I never made anything out of it because it goes on for so So long, but yeah. What HVAC brands do we like? I think for me, it's more like what HVAC brands do I avoid? Weed. True. They all got their problems. That's the thing. There's some that have a consistent problem, like on the Lennox and the leaks, consistently having a problem with those. So I just avoid them. We used to be a Lennox dealer when I was at my previous company and it was a premier dealer so I could talk to the guy up in Cleveland anytime I needed help, I could call him directly and we knew what was coming out, what problems they were having and they made it pretty easy. But yeah, Lennox has got some major leaking issues. I've seen that. I threw a couple videos up of some leaking rooftop units and holy crap, it's, yeah, not good. Not good. Availability of parts. One of my last problems I had with the Lennox was a leaking evaporator coil on like a five-year-old package unit. And we couldn't get a coil. Customer had to buy a new package unit because we couldn't get a coil. That ain't good. That was terrible. Yeah. I'm like, that thing should still be under warranty and you can't get me a coil? How old was it? Five years old. Yeah, that's not right. I don't like that. That ain't right. That happened. That was back when I was working for these home warranty companies. I have completely been going now. Yeah, those are a disaster. I got screwed a couple times by those where I got things approved and then we went to apply for the payment and then they're like, no, we're not doing that. I'm like, you said you approved it. And they're like, yeah, well. And he just totally blew me off. I'm like, okay, no more. We won't do that no more. Yeah, I don't like begging for my money. No. Nope. That's why we don't do anything like that. So if you want us to do a warranty company like that, we basically are going to collect on you and you can get reimbursed. We're not dealing with it. Yeah. That's what I tell customers. Sometimes in my software, I can see that they used to have a home warranty and I'll ask them, do you still have your home warranty? And they'll say, yeah, but they said that you no longer work with them. I'm like, that's right. I'll do the repair, but you have to deal with the home warranty, not me. Yeah. Nope. I don't blame you. Especially when you're a one-man show, you can't afford to be waiting around for your money forever. No, you can't help it. It happens. I'm like dealing with rental companies and with customers and you get people that are overdue on payments. And I got this one rental company. They're pretty good about sending me business, but they got some bills that are way, way overdue and I'm letting them ride. I just keep sending them. But emails and bringing it up in conversation, I don't want to lose their business, but I want to get paid. Yeah, but if you're not getting paid, it ain't no business. Now, can I respond to somebody or is that only you can do that? Like you put down there, I love Mitsubishi, which is probably one of my more popular videos. It says I hate Mitsubishi. And then everybody's like, well, they're some of the best. I never said it was the best or not the best. I said I hate them because they, you know, did a horrible job at training. Some people just don't listen to what I say sometimes. Yeah, I can't respond to that, though. It gives you a plus symbol. What are you supposed to do with that plus symbol? Does it do anything? I don't know. I'm trying to find the comment. It's the wife there, Chronic Flute. So she's about maybe eight or nine comments from the bottom. I haven't used this program before. Mitsubishi, to me, seems to be a little bit overpriced for what they are. Yeah. The same place I bought my Weather King at, they sell Frederick. And Frederick is, I guess, supposedly owned by Rheem and Ruud now. Thank You know, I've worked for dealers that owned Rheem, and I've had Rheem for my own house, my first house. And I never had problems with it. They're pretty reliable stuff. And so, I mean, I ain't got no problem with it. And it's like everything I've seen on that unit. Which I need to be editing it because I'm like way behind on releasing a video. you. So, dude, Reem and Rude, to me, they're solid products. They have about, they have a similar fail rate as any of the other big name brands. And what I like about them is when they go out of warranty, their parts aren't so high you have to buy a new system. Yeah. And that's what usually happens with the carrier stuff. Once it's out of the 10-year warranty, you're, it's going to hurt. I know, Carrier and Trane, the same way on that. I think that's their business model. They want to move big boxes. They don't want to sell parts. Yeah, I agree. But there's one thing with the Rheem and Ruud that I do not like is their higher-end equipment, the inverter series. Basically in my opinion any inverter residential system that doesn't use the reheat on the gas during the winter is a waste of An inverter system. The reheat, what now? See, like Gree on their Gree Flex, what they do to produce high heat when it's really cold outside is they use like room temperature gas and they inject it into the suction on the compressor so that it's not so cold and it can produce high heat. So what they're doing is they're reheating part of the refrigerant. They're running it through the heat sink on the inverter. to heat it up and they're injecting that into the suction and that allows them to produce 95 degree air with a heat pump no heat strips down to like five degrees. They've actually got that in their manual that's how they're doing it? Yes so in the inverter system that to me that is not using this reheat one way or another is a waste of an inverter system. Well, I mean, like the Mitsubishi don't do that. I mean, it's just, if you think about it, though, if you're bypassing it from, say, your discharge or even whatever into the suction, I would think you're losing your capacity, which you usually lose it anyway at those temperatures. The way they used to do it on the first Greeflex is they would have a liquid receiver from the liquid coming back from the, well, it's actually the condenser because it's on the inside when it's running in heat. They would have a liquid receiver and they would take vapor off the top of that and inject it in. So you weren't in there pulling it off of the inverter, like off of the MOSFETs and all that stuff though. I mean, how much freaking electricity would they be wasting in heat generation? to gather enough heat to make a difference. I just, like Mitsubishi is good, depending if you go with a hyperheat, which I know, you know, you guys probably never sell them down there because you never get truly cold. But like, those are good for like negative, I think 15 degrees. They got to be doing the same thing. I thought they speeded it up because like they don't run at 60 Hertz. They can run anywhere from 100 to, you know, 150 Hertz or more. And they're running. They got to be, they got to be doing this. All the mini split systems are starting to do it now. Midea is doing it. The Grees are doing it. Almost all of your mini splits have been doing it for a long time now. That's why they don't ever need heat strips. Like we can install a Greeflex down here. And during the winter, it gets down to 17 degrees and we don't need heat strips. That's summer 17 degrees. I know, but any other heat pump like the Bosch, it doesn't do that. So I have to install heat strips. Well, yeah, but how many mini splits actually have heat strips? I've never seen one. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, you're going to have to do a ducted mini split of some sort or whatever. That's what the Greeflex is. It is a ducted mini split system. Gotcha. So it does not need heat strips. Which I think is crazy not to have them as a backup anyway. What if the compressor takes a ---- in your middle of winter? You've got to have something as a backup. Build a fire. Be burning the manuals and your check and everything else. I mean, we always do it. I like dual fuel for me because, I mean, we run them down to about, you know, depending on what the efficiency of the unit, we'll run them down to 30. Like, I run mine down, I've got it notated on my duct work on my return, exactly what I can get out of it at whatever outdoor temperature. But when you're dealing, like, say, all electric, where each strip's pulling 20 amps to 22 amps apiece, and the outside unit's only pulling eight. It's like I can run that thing 24/7 and still not use as much electricity as what that electric strip is going to be on. And so we run them, you know, depending on whether it's dual fuel or whether it's, you know, electric backup, you know, we'll run them both at the same time and not even lock the heat pump out at all. But now if it's a gas furnace, then yeah, we'll shoot them off at usually 30, 35, 30. And then if it's an inverter system, we can run those down to anywhere from five to, you know, area like the Carrier, we can run that down to that. And then you'll take over with the gas furnace then. But yeah, dual fuel is a good idea. But down here is it's not feasible for you guys. It's a waste of money. Yeah. Just like you probably don't sell that many 90% furnaces either. No, it's not required down here. See, for me personally, I like 90%-er because it's safer. You have a plastic pipe that's going out at minimum temperatures. Thank They're not usually that much more money. I mean, sometimes around $800 more, you know, something like that. It's like we require a higher SEER rating on our heat pumps, but we don't have the higher... SEER rating or the 90% rating on our furnaces. you. Yeah. So if we install a 90% furnace, we have to install all new exhaust. Yeah. I mean, that would be an issue. I mean, for like us, I mean, a lot of times we'll have a regular water heater. So, you know, we may keep that if it's natural vent. But, yeah, a lot of times we'll get them to upgrade that to possibly a power vent water heater or a... On-demand water heater or something. Totally different areas, though. Have you heard about these heat pump water heaters? My power company pushed them, and I think they're already backing away from it now after so many years. Because you're basically putting cold air into your house. Why is it a heat pump? Because the amount of heat you can get out of it is such a smaller amount. I mean, why are they calling it a heat pump? Because it is. Because it's only producing hot water. It's not producing cold water. Yeah, correct. So, I mean, that is one way, yeah. I mean, but how else do you explain it? I mean... Does it have a reversing valve in it? I don't think it would because you're putting that heat... Then it's not a heat pump. Well, let me think here. I don't know for certain. I ain't a plumber. So, let me think here. So, you're getting hot there. You'd about have to either do an off-cycle defrost or you'd probably have to... Yeah, you might possibly go into it. You'd have to pull it up. I'm not certain. I've looked at them, thought about getting them, but they're like $1,500. You know, I read about them, and the first thing I thought was, what plumber is actually going to work on what may be a CO2 heat pump? CO2? It's possible. I suppose it could be. Most of them are just regular refrigerant, I believe. But even so, they're not going to work on it. They'll just replace it. Probably. So is the heat pump that sits on top, is it modular? Can you replace that and put it back on the... I think you can put a new compressor in it. You know, you could probably replace the, you know, the coil. But I've only seen one or two of them around. I've seen them at the supply houses, but I haven't like, you know, I've only seen one running at a business once, but I have not done much with them. I thought about getting it, but I mean... It sounds like a twist on the old idea where you had systems, That would use the hot gas off of a heat pump to heat the water heater. I know you've probably seen that. Yeah, we used them in the grocery stores all the time, but I thought about building one for mine. I mean, you could do it technically with a heat exchanger and just put a circulator pump and let it circulate through the heat exchanger. And you'd get free hot water in the summertime because you just run your discharge gas into that first and then loop it back out to the condenser when you're done for further condensing. You're probably going to have to add a receiver and stuff like that to be able to make up for the extra refrigerant, depending on what mode you're in. But my only problem with those that I have worked on is that when in your heat exchanger in the pump part there, I'm coming back eventually here. I don't know what it did. I see myself on the camera there. There we go. There's that. Why am I not showing up? Hold on a second here. Please stand by guys. There's that one. Let's see. We got you on that one. I know. There we go. Now this one works. Okay, there we go. All better. Those heat pumps have the circulating pump in a heat exchanger where water's next to it. I've never seen that in a residential market. I've only seen that in grocery stores. But I'm saying I've thought about building one out of like parts laying around that we were going to throw away. They often leak from, what is it, hydrolysis? No. Where the liquid peels away the copper. Kind of like electrolysis? Electrolysis, that's what I was thinking of. Okay. They start to leak after a while, and then people just end up disconnecting. Which wouldn't surprise me. Yeah. I mean, you could do it like, I don't know, because, I mean, you could, I've thought about doing, I've thought about making my own geothermal. And because like there's a place up here that literally does direct copper tubing into the ground instead of using the water. It's waterless heat pump or waterless geothermal. And so they literally go down at a diagonal with a special bore system and put like three eighths lines down and come back. And then they put like this mixture of like a heat compound. But it's kind of like a, I don't know, it's. Like a gel or something? Yeah, something similar to that. And basically it helps, you know, like a putty, whatever you want to call it. You know, it's a heat compound that basically helps extract the heat or whatever into the ground. And those have came out higher efficiencies than what even the water systems have. And so I've thought about just when my system is about done, maybe just for giggles, just try it and see what happens if I bury my condenser coil out in the yard and do my thing and see how well it turns out. But usually they might work. It might. I mean, I've been told that they've calculated it up. And supposedly it's a local contractor we've got here within, you know, not too far away. And I don't know if he's the first one that came up with it, but there's not many of them out there. there, but usually I know my previous sales guy that Helped design Ethan's system. He said he couldn't even compete with that on the efficiencies. It blew away our geothermal stuff that we were selling because it was so much more efficient. Well, some of these convertibles. It was a direct expansion system. I mean, they literally were taking the condenser coil right into the ground. Obviously, I would think that the copper was probably jacketed with some sort of rubber or something to keep it from getting ate up by the minerals and things like that through the ground. But I've never got to see it in person, but I have seen their training videos or some of their brochures, things that they show the customer. And I'd be definitely interested in it because, I mean, you know, we do get kind of cold up here. So the heat pump I've got only runs down to, you know, moderate temperatures. And then after that, I'm pretty well done. Well, right here, I'm on the water. I could do an open loop system and geothermal that way. I mean, I could just use river water. Yeah. Yeah, you could because, I mean, it's going to probably stay above freezing. Oh. That ain't never going to freeze. Yeah, no, it's not. So, yeah, you could get away with it. You have to filter it somehow so you don't get some stuff in there. There are people that do that. There's a creek not far from here that people use geothermal systems or what I guess you'd call it a water source because it's not geothermal. They just pull water out of the creek and then dump it back in the creek when they're done. Which, yeah, there's people that's done that with wells. Which is kind of wasteful when you're doing it with a well system. You're not allowed to dump it back down the well because then you're potentially contaminating the aquifer. But the pump and dump thing, basically what we called it, that was something that came out. A lot of people did it in the 80s, I think. Because, I mean, that water is going to come out of there at maybe 54 degrees, something like that. And that's a hell of a lot better than air temperature being at 30 or zero. So it works. It works. I kept having to rebuild some of their. Their valves is they would get sand in their valves or just replace them. Was that a water head pressure control valve basically? No it's just basically a water valve that turns on. Basically they're running it like a well. Well. Mhm. Oh solenoid basically. It opens up all the time. It's a solenoid. Yep. So it just turns on when when you get a call on why it allows water to run through. Slow opening valve, slow closing. We've had a guy that was supposedly on a natural spring and his basically he was taking the water and dumping it right out into his pond. So it wasn't completely getting wasted. Um, and I've seen them do it off of a pond before too. That works too, because I mean, in reality, it doesn't take much water to, you know, absorb or extract the heat. So yeah, I can see that working. It looks like somebody may have made a comment just for you. Let me try to pull it up. Uh, I'm too good. Ammonia. You ever worked on ammonia? They wanted me to go to class for it this year, and I said no, just because we only scored one contract so far for a big company. And so we sent five guys to school for it out west. By the time we got done paying them and paying for the school and the airfare and all that, we probably had maybe $8,000 to $10,000 per person in it. And I know what was going to happen is that we'll have one guy that lives closest to it, and he's going to get all the experience. And I don't like working on something if I'm not going to get a chance to work on it on a routine basis because you're going to forget. And that seems to happen a lot to where if I'm going to do something, I want to be good at it. I don't want to just make my way through it and get it done. So I said, nah, you get more jobs, and then maybe I'll consider it later. Right now I'm okay with just playing with the chillers and stuff like that. I used to work at a chicken plant and they had just regular heat pumps on the roof, but the refrigeration and all the meat processing rooms was done by ammonia. And I never worked on the ammonia, but it seemed like they must have had a lot of leakage because I could smell it. And they had this great big ammonia tank on the side of the building that they kept having to have a truck come up to and fill it up. I just felt like that couldn't be efficient, they're doing it like that. No, it wasn't working right. I mean, you shouldn't have leaks, and that was one of the things we had to do with those guys. We had to get them certified for respirators. Thank Anytime there's any type of major leak, you're not allowed to have just one guy. There's a lot of rules to it. You can have two guys on site. I got thinking about what on-call is going to be like, so those guys, they're the only ones that can go down there legally. They've got to be licensed to do it. Um, I, another reason why I just, I, we got done with the grocery stores. you. I thought, man, I don't want to deal with the, um, the ammonia on top of that. It's going to be, you know, a learning curve. At least one thing with ammonia, if you got a leak, you can smell it. Oh, plain as day. And it's the most efficient refrigerant out there. The only thing better is water. And so that was the biggest thing. And people think it's going to be huge just because it's environmentally friendly. It's cheap to buy, but it's, you know. And we'll see whether I do it later. But for right now, I'm not too horribly interested. And I played with one system, and every time I got near it, I just did not like dealing with the – you get hit with that stuff one time, and you can't breathe immediately. You're like, eh, I don't know if I want to deal with that. No, I've never had to deal with that. Yeah, it'll take your breath away immediately. Well, I've read about where major leaks have happened in facilities like that, and people have died because of it. So I know it's dangerous. Let's see here. Let's look that up. Propane versus ammonia. What's more efficient? I spoke with someone over in Europe not too long ago, and they're already making moves to get rid of R-454 and R-32 for more flammable options. Yeah, we're so restricted here. That's the biggest thing is we'll never get it approved to go that big. Thank I'm trying to find, I think what AI is finding here is propane, they're kind of looking at it as a burning source, not for refrigerant. Propane, refrigerant versus ammonia. Maybe we'll do refrigerant behind it. Refrigerant versus ammonia, what's more efficient? Let's see what it finds now. Ammonia is more efficient than propane as a refrigerant you. because of its superior thermodynamic properties resulting in higher efficiency and better cooling capacity. However, propane offers better environmental performance compared to many synthetic refrigerants, though it is highly flammable. So. I knew that the guys told me that they learned that in the class. It was a four-day class or five. I think it was four-day class, five-day class. The place they went to was out west, and it's one of the biggest places in the country to go, and that's why we went to one of the best ones to go to. I guess there's one up in New York also that you can get trained at. But, yeah, so I don't know. That's what AI says. Well, I go to bed early because I wake up early, so I'm probably going to get ready to call it quits. What time do you go to bed? 8.30? 9 o'clock? Yeah. What time do you get up? 9. 5. 5? Yep. Yep. No, I don't get up that early. I usually wake up around 6, and then by the time I leave, it's somewhere around 7, 7.30, somewhere in that ballpark. It just depends. No, that's fine. I got shelving to put up in the closet, and I need a video edited, which I'm massively behind on that, so it's so much going on. Well, guys, I appreciate everybody coming out. Now, Rick, thanks for coming on the show. It was nice talking to you. Yep, same here. You've got a lot of knowledge to share with a lot of people, so I'm glad you came on. Thank you. So, guys, thank you. I'll catch you on the next broadcast. And, um...